Best practice in dreamweaver based web design

Hi DW Gurus
I have been learning dreamweaver at work and at home for a while now and I am very interested in getting some details about best practices.
I am aware that my designs are still quite simple and don't expand dreamweaver anyway near its abilities, however as a novice I am sticking with DW CS4 and trying to developing foundation skills before trying to move on to greater adventures in web design.  My dream is to eventually leave my employer and start my own freelance design business that I can manage while I am travelling in SE Asia (yeah I know - dream on .....). I am saving for my CS4 master suite license - my current one belongs to my employer.
In particular I have just started to do some free design a community organisation - I am trying to develop a portfolio of sites that I can show new clients (with money) what they could expect for their investments.
I am interested in getting some ideas about work flows - design standards - whether designers use the dreamweaver layouts - whether to code or to use the WYSIWYG.
Anyone care to share how they plan and go about their design work.
In my past life I was a SQL developer and a C#.net programmer - in those feilds there are standards for code and applications . Are there industry standards that would point to good or better designing?
Thanks for your time and interest in my topic,
Respect,
Doug

The first thing you need to learn is html and css, without knowing the programming language will only make DW a hard tool to use.  You need to learn coding to WC3 standards.
FREE HTML & CSS Tutorials  - http://w3schools.com/
http://reference.sitepoint.com/css
http://reference.sitepoint.com/html
Validation tools that you will need to bookmark.
HTML Validator - http://validator.w3.org
CSS Validator - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Hopefully you use Firefox, and if you do, the web developer toolbar is essential:
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
Yes, you can rely somewhat on DW's layout mode (or what features are left of it), but this will only lead to problems when it comes time to troubleshoot any problem pages that do not render correctly across the various browsers.
A paying client will expect a well designed, fully functional website and you need to have the programming skills to accomplish this for them.
Not sure how far advanced you are but the Adobe site has quite a few CSS based tutorials - and I would strongly urge you to go through the series listed below - to get up to speed on the correct way to lay out a page.
Creating your first website (series)
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Dreamweaver/10.0_Using/WS42d4a1c0291fbe4e59147ede1232ff9686c-8 000.html
LIST OF CSS TUTORIALS ON ADOBE SITE:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/css.html
If you use Fireworks as a tool to create your layouts, then the following tutorial may be of benefit:
TAKING FIREWORKS COMP TO DREAMWEAVER:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/dw_fw_css_pt1.html
Good luck in your future endeavours 
Nadia
Adobe Community Expert : Dreamweaver
Unique CSS Templates | Tutorials | SEO Articles
http://www.DreamweaverResources.com
Web Design & Development
http://www.perrelink.com.au
http://twitter.com/nadiap

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